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Tag Archives: Facebook

We already know that Facebook is the web’s biggest time sink. If you look at the average amount of time (according to Nielsen) users spend on the social network, Facebook is a clear winner over sites such as Google or Yahoo.

Now, according to comScore, Facebook is also first when it comes to the total amount of time users are spending on the site. In August, U.S. web users spent 41.1 million minutes on Facebook, which was about 9.9% of their entire web-surfing time in that month. In this same period, people spent 39.8 million minutes on all of Google’s sites, and those include another huge online timesink – YouTube.

comScore puts Yahoo in third place, with U.S. web users spending 37.7 million minutes on its sites, which was about 9.1% of their web surfing time in August.

The numbers are even more impressive when you consider that Facebook had just overtaken Yahoo in July, and in August last year U.S. web surfers had spent less than 5% of their online time on the social networking service.

Still, it hardly comes as a surprise: Facebook has been growing steadily in the last couple of years, and in July it announced it had more than 500 million active users.

If Facebook keeps growing, a year from now Google may find itself far behind Facebook when it comes to web users’ minutes. But does Facebook have room for growth? Mark Zuckerberg predicts the site’s userbase might even reach one billion. The number doesn’t sound too far-fetched, given that Facebook still has room for international growth — for example in China and Russia.

Of course, comScore only counts users from the U.S., so the global picture is still blurry. But the facts show that Facebook users spend a huge amount of time on the site, and it’s a worrying stat for Google. Google’s many online properties (Gmail, Search and YouTube, to name a few) have vast influence and reach. But right now, without a large social networking property (Orkut doesn’t count as serious competition to Facebook anymore), Google will have a hard time snatching users’ time from Facebook’s hands

Google has acquired Ångströ, a service for delivering intelligent search results about a person’s professional network. It has also hired its founder, likely in an effort to build a legitimate competitor to Facebook.

“With the help of investors like CommerceNet and advisors such as Avery Lyford, our team shipped apps to discover hot new photos on Facebook, improve Caller ID by using LinkedInprofiles, adding style and links to Twitter, create a real-time social address book, and a slew of other services,” the company said in its farewell announcement.

Founder Dr. Rohit Khare has already joined the search giant, according to the Los Angeles Times. Before Ångströ, Khare founded KnowNow, an RSS service for the enterprise, and before that he was director of CommerceNet Labs.

Khare will be working on Google Me, the company’s still-unconfirmed social network. He will likely be working with Max Levchin, the former CEO of Slide, CTO of PayPal and Google’s newest VP of engineering, as well as Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra, who was reportedly instrumental in recruiting Khare.

Google has more riding on its upcoming social network than almost any other project in the company’s history. The search giant has failed multiple times to make inroads in social media, while Facebook is growing like wildfire. Google perceives Facebook as a major threat to the company’s dominance of the web. Khare’s arrival is yet another sign that the tech titan isn’t fooling around anymore when it comes to social.

That’s the question we posed in this week’s Web Faceoff, our ongoing series comparing technology apps or ideas. We asked you which location-based service you preferred: Facebook Places or Foursquare?

This week’s winner: Foursquare! The contest wasn’t even close; with 57.11% of the vote (1,611 votes), Foursquare remained the king of geolocation. Facebook Places was able to muster 18.86% of the popular vote. Of our voting readers, 7.73% (218 votes) said it was a tie between the two, while 16.31% of you (460 votes) said that you preferred another location-based service.

Many of you pointed out that Facebook Places and Foursquare are likely to be used by different types of people for different purposes. “Facebook is going for the people who want to connect every part of their Facebook experience to a location, while Foursquare is going for a games-based market,” said commenter Anuj Ahooja. Others pointed out that while they preferred Foursquare, Facebook’s userbase of 500 million (and counting) will make tough competition for any startup.

What do you think this week’s poll results? How will the competition between the two companies play out? Let us know in the comments.

Writing a Facebook note can be a great way to start a discussion with friends about life’s big decisions or moments. What’s not always so great is creating a note or going back to one you already started.

Want to make something bold? You need to know the HTML tag for that. Want to work on an earlier draft? You have to navigate a bunch of links to get to your draft.

We’re changing all of that so it’s quicker and easier to create and find your notes and the notes from the people around you. We’ve rolled out a new layout and features for Facebook Notes. Now you can:

Format notes more easily with a familiar text editor. Stop looking up HTML for common formatting like bold, italics, bulleted and numbered lists, or indented quotes. Instead just click the formatting icons as you write a note.

Tag that special non-profit you believe in or that musician you’re raving about in a note. We’ve added tagging of Facebook Pages—such as celebrities, interests and activities. As with tags of friends, tags of Pages will appear in a box on the note’s page. When viewing Notes from a Facebook Page, you can browse notes in which that Page has been tagged by one of your friends or by people who shared their note with “everyone.”

Find more relevant notes through a cleaner layout. A common left-hand menu includes links to your note, notes about yourself, your drafts and easy ways to find notes about friends and Pages.